Why I Live in and Love Africa #154

A chance to meet an African crested rat, or Lophiomys imhausi, which the New York Times recently described as "a creature so large, flamboyantly furred and thickly helmeted it hardly seems a member of the international rat consortium. Yet it is indeed a rat, a deadly dirty rat, its superspecialized pelt permeated with potent toxins harvested from trees."

I mean, how could you NOT want to encounter one of these sweet lil' fur babies and it's "twinned flank strips of doom"?

I mean, it looks so cute....



And the best news of all?? It lives in Kenya and Somalia!

On second thought, maybe I'll hold out for a sloth, which I have been rather obsessed with ever since I saw this:



And now, thanks to Ellen DeGeneres (has anyone ever said that before?), I know I'm not alone.



I'm fairly certain that's exactly what would happen to me.

Memorandum of Misunderstanding

One of the things that I came to Somaliland to work on was finalizing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the relevant ministry (health).  This is something that this ministry recently decided was critical and required for all of its NGO partners.  Unfortunately, they forgot to tell NGOs this until recently.  Also, it's possible that they haven't entirely smoothed out the process.  But they are serious about it, to the point that they actually told one major NGO's donors to cut their funding until that organization signed an MOU with the ministry. 

There's a couple of things underlying this MOU business. 

1.  The government would like to know what NGOs are up to in Somaliland and to coordinate their activities to make sure that there isn't a lot of overlap and that priority needs are being met.

MYTH:  A country's government knows what it is capable of and what its priorities are.  NGOs work closely with the government to fill gaps according to the government's priorities. 

REALITY: NGOs respond to needs they perceive, often without particularly caring what the government thinks or wants.   Sometimes this is because the government doesn't know what it wants, sometimes it is because what the government wants isn't realistic or particularly related to the needs and wellbeing of its citizens (hellllllloooo South Sudan!), sometimes it's because the NGO thinks it knows better.

Somaliland is somewhere in the middle.  There's a pretty solid government here, and it actually has a well thought out, if ambitious, national health policy.  Certain things, like maternal health, and models of improvement, such as building up health posts in smaller communities to refer to larger regional hospitals, are clearly highlighted as priorities.  But there's not necessarily a clear, or feasible, way of moving forward towards these things and still achieving short-term gains in health and nutrition.  NGOs would need to be involved, and, through the things like the MOU, the ministry is pushing NGOs to do exactly that:  be involved only in specific ways that fit in with their goals. 

COMPLICATED QUESTION:  If a government can't handle meeting the needs of its citizens and has to invite (or submit to the presence of, at least) NGOs, does it get to maintain the sole right to decide what the priorities and interventions should be?


2. A less noble reason.  The ministry thinks that having MOUs will allow it to have more information about the funding going to NGOs.  They want to make sure that the (international) NGO is providing some of its own funding and not entirely depending on UNICEF or World Food Program funds.  Their argument is that if a NGO isn't providing some of its own funding, then what's the point of having that international NGO, that instead those UNICEF and WFP funds should go to local agencies to do the work.

In principle, I don't disagree.  However, it fundamentally ignores a major point.  Namely, it's about more than money:  there's a big element of capacity involved.  Believe me, if my organization thought that a local agency could handle the programs we are doing now, we would either be partnered with one of those organizations or wouldn't be there in the first place because there wouldn't be need.  The sheer existence of an organization in no way guarantees its ability to actually do anything meaningful.

What's clear is that my organization has to have an MOU to keep working here, which we are committed to doing because we perceive continued unmet need, and that somebody needs to be here shepherding it through the ministry.  It's an exercise in bureaucracy at this point, which is a bit tedious, but its intent is good, for the most part, and its a part of doing business..

In other news, here's the view of Hargeisa from out my hotel room window. 

Somaliland Redux

After a couple months off from blogging, I recently started feeling like writing again.  What better time to start than a return trip to Somaliland, the country that inspired this blog to start with?  And, of course, a well-timed conversation about bushmeat that reminded me how fun blogging can be. 

This morning, for the second time in my life, I woke up long before dawn and rode through a cool, dark, empty Nairobi to catch a flight to Hargeisa, Somaliland.  After two hours of flying across miles of empty desert, we came in low over dozens of camels and touched down on the bumpy runway.  I paid the $20 landing fee and the $3 something fee and headed to the hotel where my organization's Hargeisa office is based.  The same, and yet so different, and it made me think.

When I came to Hargeisa last time, in August and September 2010, I was nearing the end of nursing school.  I knew that nursing school had been a good decision, but I had also just come to the conclusion that I probably not really cut out to be a floor nurse in a hospital, even for a relatively short period of time.  I knew I either wanted to go back overseas to work or into a full-time masters  program in midwifery, but was having trouble deciding which would do a better job of getting me where I wanted to go (and be more fun). 

I'm a big believer that what's important in life is knowing where you want to go, more or less, but being willing to be pretty flexible about your route and the interesting opportunities it might bring, and this last year has really emphasized that.  I ended up taking a job as Monitoring and Evaluation Adviser with my current organization that I actually interviewed for while I was in Hargeisa (over the phone).  When I left, I didn't particularly imagine that I would be back, or that before I came back I would see a glove compartment full of bushmeat, take a speedboat down the Nile to visit clinics, cross Angola off my list of places to visit, get headbutted by a dik-dik, take a ferry across Lake Victoria, or help build a new refugee camp from the ground up, AND get to both work overseas and do a midwifery masters full time, thanks to Frontier Nursing University.

I learned a tremendous amount, and got the chance to take some really interesting trips.  I wouldn't trade either, but the job ended up not being what I really wanted to do, for a variety of reasons simple and complex.  And then, when I went to Dadaab as part of an emergency response team at the height of the famine in the Horn of Africa, I worked for the first time on actually developing and implementing humanitarian response programs, as opposed to the program support and technical backstopping that I had been doing (and what I thought I wanted to keep doing).  In Dadaab I realized that program implementation was far more interesting than I had given it credit for.  But, more importantly, I realized that a big piece of my frustration in my original job was that I wasn't necessarily comfortable telling people how to run their programs when I had never run my own.  My conclusion? That I really wanted, and needed, to run my own programs as the next step. 

After spending several months working as part of the emergency response team in the Somalia office, in mid-November I was offered and accepted a new position as the Somalia Programs Coordinator, overseeing all of my organization's programs in Somaliland and Somalia and helping develop new programs.  As opposed to being based in DC with travel to various country programs, I'm now based in Nairobi with travel to Somaliland and Somalia (security permitting and agreed on by a team of regional security advisers, Mom!).  Thus, this trip to Somaliland, where my organization runs emergency nutrition programs in the famine-stricken semi-autonomous Sool and Sanaag regions in the east of Somaliland. 

So here I am, back in Hargeisa where this whole thing started.  I've signed a year contract, so I have a bit of an idea of what the next year holds, but I'm sure there will be lots of surprises along the way.  But for now, it's dinner time and something I am 100% sure of:  it will be goat.

What Happens When There's No Thanksgiving

Last night I went to eat at Village Market in the Gigiri neighborhood of Nairobi with my friends Dave and Jojo.  It's a fairly large shopping center, but fairly low profile from the outside.  Except not last night. 

Village Market's got a bad case of the Christmases.  And it's only mid-November.

We stepped out of the taxi, blinded by the thousands of lights that had miraculously descended on every surface of Village Market.  I popped my sunglasses on and enjoyed my dinner, but not until after I got some pictures.

Disappointingly, I seem to have missed the tree lighting ceremony last weekend.  Next year!  I'll mark my calender for a weekend in late October.

I guess this finally explains the recent rolling brownouts in Nairobi at least?

Blatant Propaganda

Because, really, did propaganda ever hurt anyone?* 

Both this video (below) and this article, which primarily focuses on my organization's work in Haiti (where I was with them briefly after the earthquake), are perhaps a little saccharine for me, but they are interesting and share some things I'd probably never think to on this blog.

*Don't answer that.  Especially if you happen to be from anywhere east of Berlin.

Point o'contact

While a lot the work that I do here in the Somalia office is not all that different from in other places I have worked--proposals, talking to donors, reading the New York Times cover to cover every morning, er, I mean, checking our program progress against indicators....there are some things that I am learning how to deal with that are quite new to me.

Case in Point Number 1: Being the Primary Point of Contact

How you get chosen:  Be the only person left in the office reliable enough to answer your phone on a regular basis and responsible enough to be concerned if it doesn't ring. 

How it works: When ever anybody from the team goes into Somalia, they have to check in morning, evening and whenever they leave and then re-enter a secured compound (hotel, guesthouse, etc.)  If they don't check in, it's your job to notify HQ security ASAP so they can begin negotiating ransom.  Or just follow up and make sure everything is okay, whatever.

Example:
[9:49:00 AM] AM: hi
[9:49:08 AM] AM: just checking with you guys
[9:49:45 AM] Emma: that was fast
[9:49:51 AM] Emma: how's it looking?
[9:50:02 AM] AM: yeah its a 1 1/2 hr
[9:50:10 AM] AM: escort scary
[9:50:18 AM] AM: like black hawk down movie

Case in Point Number 2: Hijacked Vehicles

Unfortunately, this happens from time to time.  In the latest incident, one of our nutrition teams working in Eastern Somaliland was on their way back from a rural site to a larger town.  The team was pulled from the vehicle and no one was hurt (in fact, in one account--and there were several--the team wasn't even in the vehicle, they were in a restaurant eating). 

It became clear pretty quickly that, like so many things in Somalia/Somaliland, this was clan related.  It seems that the owner of the car (which was rented to my NGO) is from the same clan as the mayor of the larger town, who had recently demolished some structures in town.  These structures belonged to the clan of the people who hijacked the car and that they were on a "revenge mission."  Very mature, people. 


In the back of the vehicle were several cases of Plumpy'nut, which is a ready-to-use peanut-based paste which is given in small sachets to severely malnourished children to support rapid weight gain. It is quite delicious and packed full of calories and fat and vitamins--a small 92g sachet has 500 calories.

It's quite new on the scene (its use has been widespread for about 5 years), and has made a world of difference for lots of malnourished children.  It lasts 24 months, can be given at home, tastes delicious (a personal taste test confirmed this), doesn't need anything added to it, is light and easy to transport and can be made locally.

Anyway, I diverge.  The point is, there was a ton of Plumpy'Nut in the back of the car, enough to feed a lot of kids for a lot of days.  And you know what really makes me mad?  Stealing food from sick babies because you're mad at another clan.  That's just the kind of behavior responsible adults should be demonstrating for the youth of Somaliland.  We got the vehicle back after a few days, but the Plumpy'Nut, patient logs and baby scales were long gone. 

I'd be on the lookout for an adult man rapidly gaining weight, and we'll have the culprit.

Actually, Somalia is Solved

because I haven't posted in awhile and because sometimes you have to make light of a bad situation:

[6:13:53 PM] Erek: Yesterday I heard that they built a solid domestic agriculture sector
[6:14:06 PM] Erek: and their MoH is building health outposts in all the villages.
[6:14:25 PM] Emma: and all the pirates are gainfully employed as johnny depp lookalikes in disneyworld
[6:14:30 PM] Emma: it's a great day to be a somali
[6:16:17 PM] Erek: Al Shabaab renounced violence and dedicated their mission to advancing the rights of women.

must be all the ngos working in somalia these days.  who said the public sector isn't productive?